


we sleep better in the sun

by carloabay



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Flu, M/M, Poverty, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Protective Bucky Barnes, Sick Character, steve rogers life was just one big sick fic wasn’t it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 17:20:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29844867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carloabay/pseuds/carloabay
Summary: Steve manages to look him right in the eye, icy irises blurred with exhaustion, with illness. “You with me? Til the end of the line.“
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 6
Kudos: 29





	we sleep better in the sun

Winter takes his meagre strength from him easily. Snatches it right out of his spider-thin hands. Steve falls into bed every night, the air roaring in his ears, and all he wants is to curl into a ball under a blanket. He’s got to sleep straight, though, pillows in the right places, so’s his spine doesn’t crank up, or whatever the hell it does.

The mornings are just cold, bitter cold, and dim noises as his mom rattles around in the other room, huffing into her hands every now and again to garner a little heat. They don’t use gas, not except for the food. Steve argues when she tries to turn it on for him, he argues until his breath goes short and there are tiny tears in the corners of her eyes.

The ‘flu goes round the neighbourhood, hopping from kid to kid like it’s searching out easy targets, to lay waste to them. His mom locks the door behind her with all the windows open when she goes to work.

Steve catches it anyway. He can tell, the second it’s settled. He’s managed to wrangle his way out of the apartment block for an hour in the wintry sunlight, names in his notebook, records spread out over his knees: he gets a job in a dockyard office every so often, whenever he can crawl down there. He takes a lungful of crisp air, and it catches in his throat, taking him by surprise; before he knows what’s happening, he’s bent double and hacking up spit all over the ground.

He swears, through shuddering, heaving breaths. Everything is tight, lungs wound up like a clockwork toy, his ribs contracting, all the air turning to lead in his chest. He wheezes, pitifully, and he knows it’s no use, but he gasps for breath anyway. It comes short, shorter, shallow, some cruel hand robbing it right from his lungs. His vision bleeds grey and purple. He’s collapsed, his cheek against the gravelly concrete, and then he passes out.

Steve wakes up in his own bed. Well. He wouldn’t call it _waking_. He flickers into consciousness, and out again, the sheets starched and stiff on his bare shoulders.

†

The thing about Steve is, when you tell him not to do something, he’ll make a thing out of it. He’ll glare and snap and march a whole mile just out of spite, just because someone said it was beyond him, just because he needs to prove he’s not all he looks as, _just because_. 

Bucky stands in the doorway of the tiny room and watches the slight lift and fall of Steve’s frail chest. There’s a vein crawling across Steve’s cheek, under his eye, bruised green and stark again his white skin.

Bucky had tried to tell him, the day before, that he shouldn’t turn down at the docks, that sea air does shit-all, no matter what the doctors tried to say. He should’ve kept his damn mouth shut. Maybe then Steve would be prowling the apartment like a pissy cat instead of dying in his bed on a crisp December morning. His excuse had been the money, a couple meagre dollars paid him by the dock manager.

Sarah’s in the kitchen, trying to light the stove and muttering vengefully under her breath at the stupid thing. Bucky twists his hat between his hands, smoothing over the carefully mended rip in the brim.

Steve doesn’t wake the whole day. Soon enough, Bucky jams his hat on his head and walks off to work.

Steve needs medicine, heat, food and fresh water, and there’s precious little to go around right now. Bucky knows where Sarah keeps the earnings; he slips his whole day’s pay into the jar when her back’s turned.

It won’t be enough, it never is. Especially when he comes to visit the next day, and Steve’s lips are blue and his face looks like it’s made from wax. Sarah sits by his bed with a furious clench to her jaw. Bucky doesn’t need to ask what happened; he saw the doctor walking out with his pockets rustling with bills.

“He told me to give him rest,” Sarah growls from the bed. “I asked him could he prescribe antibiotics, and he told me ‘give him soup’, and left with his pay.”

“Quack,” Bucky says sourly. Sarah shakes her head.

“I don’t know if I got it in me, Buck,” she says.

Bucky hates the world. Steve breathes thinly through dry, whistling lips, and Bucky hates the world. He trawls the pharmacy two blocks over, and all the medicines cost more than the whole apartment. In the newspaper, a man throws himself off some scaffolding, bled dry of all his money. The next page over, taxes are raised. They use the newspaper for kindling. 

“I know you’ve been putting money in my jar, Barnes,” Sarah says, swishing the water in the kettle like it’ll warm faster. Bucky picks at his fingernails. Sarah’s still in her scrubs, her dress and apron are soaking in a thin layer of bubbles in the bathroom sink.

“I wanna do everything I can,” Bucky says, glancing over at Steve’s bedroom door. It’s more like a closet, really. Sarah stares around the cramped kitchen.

“I know,” she says. “I hate this.”

“He’ll make it,” Bucky replied. His soles are wearing thin, and the brim of his hat is ripped again. Some kid throws a rotten apple at him on the way back to his own apartment.

†

Steve hears their voices the next time he wakes up. His mom, her words blurred with weariness, and Bucky. Mouthing off at the government. He doesn’t try to call out for them. He stares up at the ceiling, his vision smeared and going double. It’s his fault.

All he’d wanted was a couple more dollars.

His breath comes like the crackle of brown paper. Everything is ground glass against his skin, the bedclothes too sharp, his pants slicing down the skin of his legs. His head is white noise and the sound of his frail heartbeat.

He won’t make it. Maybe not even to January.

† 

Bucky checks in on Steve when Sarah’s gone to work, and he sees him lying still and pale, eyes open like he woke up, then died right there. For a second, there’s a hot panic in Bucky’s chest, and he darts into the room, but then he sees Steve fiddling beneath the blankets, and he pauses.

“You’re awake,” he says. “How’s it feel?” Steve winces.

“Awful,” he croaks. Nothing more.

“You want some food?” Bucky asks. He has no idea what to do. He can’t just stand in the middle of the room and watch Steve waste away. He won’t do it anymore.

“Buck,” Steve says, and Bucky can hear that hard note in his voice. He knows what’s coming. “We both know I’m not gonna last to Christmas.”

“You have to,” Bucky says bluntly. His ribs are twisting like some angry sprite’s got a hold of them, maliciously wrenching. Steve won’t go. He can’t.

He doesn’t move towards Steve. He knows Steve doesn’t want comfort, a hand on his arm, something more. It pains Bucky to stay where he is, not least because he wants to just gather Steve up in his arms and run him away to Finland. Anywhere. Out of this damp apartment. Squeeze them out of their fragile bodies, live somewhere above the soggy winter clouds together.

“I won’t,” Steve says, and it sounds dangerously like petulance. “Buck, you know what you have to do—“

“No,” Bucky cuts in. Flat. Steve doesn’t look at him, but he sighs crisply, like he knew what Bucky would say. That just makes Bucky angrier, and it gets hot in his diaphragm, hot in his head. “No, Steve. You know I’m not going nowhere.” 

“We always say,” Steve rasps, and Bucky clenches his jaw. Steve manages to look him right in the eye, icy irises blurred with exhaustion, with illness. “You with me? Til the end of the line. Because I need you, Buck.” Bucky swallows his anger.

“Yeah,” he says, roughly. “The very end. I promise, you know I do.”

†

He’s angry at the world. They did this, the world made this, the ramshackle apartment, sweet, shrewd Sarah with her one nice dress and her fraying apron, stupid, sly Steve who talks about death like it was someone he shook hands on the street with. The world gave them nothing, and Bucky wants to wring some necks to make the world hand them what it owes for their kindness and their hungry eyes and their want to survive.

Bucky wants nothing for himself. He wants everything for sickly, pissy Steve, alone in his tiny starched bed.

†

Steve’s eyelids are thin like tissue paper. Bucky leaves him soup, because if he tried to feed him, Steve’d probably bite Bucky’s entire hand off. They sit on the narrow bed together and Steve drinks his soup messily, shakily. He grunts with frustration.

“I got you,” Bucky says.

“Don’t help me,” Steve protests. His thin thigh is hot through the leg of Bucky’s pants.

“S’alright,” Bucky says. “You got it.” Steve falls asleep, the bowl barely touched, tipping in his lap. Bucky takes it away, comes back, and Steve’s head droops right onto his shoulder. They stay like that until midnight, until Bucky can’t bear the hiss of Steve’s breath through ravaged lungs, can’t bear the feather weight on his side.

Someone robs a pharmacy on twenty-eighth, in the middle of the night, glass everywhere. Two bottles of medicine gone, one dollar left on the counter. Bucky burns the newspaper to light the gas stove before Sarah gets back.

†

Steve makes it to Christmas. He makes it January, February, March, even though Sarah has his last rites done four times in two damn months, just to be sure.

A priest hovers over Steve, and Bucky grins madly from the corner, making faces. Steve snickers, stronger than he’s been in days. Sarah gets Steve for blasphemy with her sharp tongue when the priest’s gone, and Steve makes faces at Bucky under Sarah’s arm. Bucky escapes to the street, breathes in the woolly cold air, and he’s lighter now, breezing through on that flighty smile on Steve’s face.

Sarah, though, worked to the bone and fraying at the edges, fades out a year later. She goes like a firework, and Bucky sits with his back against the wall and his knees to his chest outside her room, listening to the scrape of Steve’s voice and the cunning crackle of Sarah’s last words.

The funeral is quiet and hot. The priest stumbles through the service, and afterwards, Bucky’s mom looks frantically through the crowd for Steve. Bucky knows he’s vanished, though. Can feel it somewhere below his kidneys. He knows when Steve is gone and won’t be found.

“We should have given him a ride to the cemetery, poor kid,” says Bucky’s mom, drawing her light shawl around her shoulders. She looks at the sky, bright and blue. “Horrible day for this,” she says sadly. “Why couldn’t it have had the decency to rain? Sarah Rogers deserves the world to mourn.” She sounds a little furious, a little dramatic. Bucky knows she’s devastated. Bucky knows she wants to be left alone. He always knows just what to do.

“Yeah, ma,” Bucky says. “Listen, I’m gonna go home.” She doesn’t object.

He walks down the hot street to Steve’s instead, and catches up with a slender, crooked figure halfway down the street that turns in to the block.

“Steve,” he says. Steve’s shoulders slump, and Bucky comes up behind him as they turn off, walk slowly towards the stairs.

Bucky has never left him alone, not through that sickly winter, not through the food shortages and that time he got beat around the head by the bruising kids from the block over, and he won’t this time, either.

“We looked for you after. My folks wanted to give you a ride to the cemetery,” he says, climbing the stairs behind Steve. Steve’s tie is a little loose. His jacket sleeves are an inch too long.

“I know, I’m sorry. Just...kinda wanted to be alone,” Steve replies, without looking back. _I know_ , Bucky thinks. _I didn’t come after you. Not ‘til now._

“How was it?” he asks, instead. Steve gives the barest of thin shrugs, searching in his pockets for his key.

“It was okay. She’s next to Dad.” Bucky waits a second, as Steve pats his jacket down.

“I was gonna ask...” he doesn’t finish his sentence, he knows Steve will cut him off. Always knows.

“I know what you’re gonna say, Buck,” Steve says wearily.

“We can put the couch cushions on the floor like when we were kids,” Bucky implores, trying to be light. God knows they both need it. “It'll be fun. All you gotta do is shine my shoes, maybe take out the trash.” He lets Steve pick around helplessly in his pockets for a moment longer before kicking over the brick beside the railing and picking up the key. He hands it to Steve, and finally, Steve looks him in the eye. His lids are bruised, unhealthy. “Come on,” Bucky says. _Let me be with you. Like it’s always been._ Never that easy. 

“Thank you, Buck,” Steve says, taking the key. Bucky twists his lips. He knows what’s coming. Always knows. Steve looks up, every part of him square and solid, even looking so frail in the sun. “But I can get by on my own.” Bucky almost smiles, nudges Steve’s elbow with his hand. This close, he could reach out and grab his fingers, lattice them together. Never that easy.

“The thing is, you don't have to.” Steve looks down at his sleeves, and Bucky chucks his chin, letting his smile drop away. “I'm with you to the end of the line,” he says, and he thinks he sees something bright in Steve’s eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> insomnia is a curse but it also allows you to become so desperate you start stucky-fanfiction-ing your way out of life am I right


End file.
